Beachbody

Organization

Beachbody, LLC is a direct response media company with a focus on fitness, nutrition, and weight loss management programs.

The Team Beachbody program was launched as a membership-based online support community that offers a wide array of fitness programs and access to motivational trainers. Team Beachbody helps people achieve their fitness goals and enjoy healthy and fulfilling lives.

Challenge

The Team Beachbody brand grew rapidly, anchored by the website Teambeachbody.com. IT professionals within the company identified a need to re-engineer the entire website in order to keep up with the dynamic growth of the brand, including looking for tools to easily and quickly make changes on the Beachbody website.

A main objective for the website's redesign was to find a software application that could scale with business growth and align with Team Beachbody's viral marketing nature. The media company was also looking to develop WOWY SuperGym, a social, interactive system that would build connections between its fitness community members. To accomplish these goals, the company sought a robust and stable framework that could provide much-needed flexibility and nimbleness to respond to a continuously changing set of business needs.

The IT department began a complete information architecture workshop, as well as comprehensive user studies, in order to find a development platform that best aligns with its goals.

Resolution

After considering the requirements for redesigning the Team Beachbody site and exploring the options of homegrown solutions against proprietary solutions and opensource alternatives, the IT team concluded that an open-source portal platform would be the best solution for providing the benefits needed to rapidly develop the site and make it more manageable in the future.

Following a review of several out-of-the-box portal options, Beachbody selected Liferay Portal for offering the lowest total cost of ownership and the flexibility necessary as the company moved forward. Liferay's robust application development platform and numerous collaboration portlets and back-end services met Beachbody's goals to find a flexible platform that would change with its business. Liferay brought a mature framework for scalability, flexibility, ease of use, and enriching user experiences.

"We concluded that a portal would give us the benefits we needed to rapidly develop the site, and make it more manageable in the future," said Siddharth Jain, Senior Director of Engineering at Beachbody. " … Liferay was a perfect fit for us since we were able to get some core enhancements done and some new features developed."

Beachbody selected Rivet Logic to lead the development of the new WOWY SuperGym social application on the Liferay platform. Rivet Logic's deep technical knowledge and extensive experience designing and implementing innovative open-source applications, along with its familiarity with Liferay, created an optimal combination for Beachbody.

"We were building a social application with some unique demands, so we needed a trusted Liferay development partner with proven experience building innovative solutions," Jain said.

The new WOWY SuperGym application, which allows BeachBody customers to connect with each other and their coaches before, after and during their daily workout sessions, has proven a benefit to all stakeholders. By extending the existing Team Beachbody community to include participants such as expert trainers who can customize workout programs for members, the social application builds customer loyalty, expands membership and generates recurring revenue.

Business Value Added

Liferay's flexibility played a crucial role in the redesign and in overcoming some critical hurdles that would have delayed the launch by months. Liferay was able to extend the application to include a variety of features such as discussion forums, scheduling and sharing workout calendars, contests, friend feeds and email integration, among others. In addition, the open source model established a foundation from which to reduce operating costs and accommodate future extensions.

As a cost-effective, zero-license-fee approach based on open standards, the Liferaybased solution enabled Beachbody to minimize upfront investment and focus efforts on customization and innovation.

We concluded that a portal would give us the benefits we needed to rapidly develop the site, and make it more manageable in the future… Liferay was a perfect fit for us since we were able to get some core enhancements done and some new features developed.